Üner Tan
Turkish evolutionary biologist (1937–2022)
Üner Tan (1 May 1937 – 6 February 2022) was a Turkish neuroscientist and evolutionary biologist. He is best known for his discovery and study of the human quadrupedal condition he named the Uner Tan syndrome. He taught at Çukurova University until his retirement in 2004 and had previously taught at several other institutions.
Biography
Tan was born in Ünye, Turkey. He graduated from secondary school in Çorum and started college at Ege University, at the Faculty of Medicine, in 1956. He continued at Göttingen University and graduated from there and the Max-Planck Institute in 1966. He returned to Turkey at 1969 and worked at Hacettepe University in Ankara, and Atatürk University in Erzurum, Black Sea Technical University in Trabzon and Çukurova University in Adana. Tan retired in 2004, and died in February 2022, at the age of 84.
Uner Tan syndrome
According to Tan, persons affected by this syndrome walk with a quadrupedal locomotion and are afflicted with "primitive" speech and severe mental retardation; he postulated that this is an example of backward evolution. He proposed the syndrome after studying the Ulas family of rural southern Turkey, five of whom have these symptoms.
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This entry incorporates text from “Üner Tan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.